


carry this picture

by Verbyna



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Depression, Filming, Future Fic, Jack Zimmermann's Overdose, M/M, Outing, Queer Themes, do you believe in love after love, netflix au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 04:22:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19822444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: It was Kent who got the call from the TV producers, though. It was Kent who ended up producing the show, more or less.





	carry this picture

**Author's Note:**

> i slipped and fell sideways into a netflix au, and my co-conspirators SummerFrost and blithelybonny were there to catch me. thank you for indulging me and for the read-through, especially where my industry slang was showing. <3

i.

If the show gets anything right, it should be this: Kent and Jack never intended to come out while they were still playing.

Not at first, that is, though Jack changed his mind when he and Bittle got serious. Not at all, in Kent’s case, but it wasn’t his choice - none of it was his choice, but especially not the way it happened, with an overinvested podcast producer digging him out of the closet Parse-and-Zimms-first. Like his privacy wasn’t even an afterthought, and his life was a side-note in the epic romance of Jack and his husband.

It was Kent who got the call from the TV producers, though. It was Kent who ended up producing it, more or less.

And he’ll get that one thing across, because it’s his life, his secrets he’s laying out for everyone to see. If the audience understands anything, it has to be that they never meant for any of this to happen.

*

It takes him months to find a kid to play his own role. There’s something wrong with all of them: one comes close but he looks too eager delivering the lines, one comes even closer but can’t pull off viciousness. 

There are a lot of scenes where Kent is vicious. He made a note on one of the early drafts for the script - _don’t make me look good._

Eventually it was Jack himself who found the actor, a Canadian kid who’d mostly done indies up in Vancouver. Not that Jack was looking for someone, he barely signed off on the project in the first place, but the guy, Alex, took a selfie with Jack and tagged Kent in it. He looks passably like Kent, but what got him the part was his hustle.

Someone like that, Kent thought, wouldn’t go soft in the middle of a shoot, screaming while his heart breaks for the camera. And he wouldn’t be precious about asking Kent questions, which was his other fear; it can’t just be him telling the story.

It has to make sense, and it doesn’t. Not without someone there to pick at the threads and knot them together in a way Kent never managed, so he could trace everything he did back to the start of it, to the sixteen-year-old who left a broken home and never learned how to hold anything together.

*

It’s Alex’s idea to cast someone better-looking than Jack for that part.

_So no one has to wonder why you fell so hard, man. He’s got the eyes, I get it, but you used to look at him like he was… shit, I don’t know. Like he was the best person in the world. Give me a reason to look at the dude like that._

Gage is from Toronto and he’s ridiculously attractive. He can act, too, but he never looks like he’s acting. You can smell the fear on him and you can tell he’s lying through his teeth, but the fear and the lies are such a big part of him that it wouldn’t occur to you to mention it.

He’s perfect.

*

Alex moves into Kent’s house for the last three months of prep, and pulls the whole miserable story out of him, one pointed question at a time.

 _Did you love him?_ “Yes.”

Kent loved Jack so much and fell for him so fast that his ears didn’t stop ringing until he was told to leave the hospital, the day after the Draft. He remembers feeling it in his fingers and the back of his throat, sitting in his stomach like a stone, tasting it in every stolen bite of Jack’s stupid tasteless sandwiches: love like a sickness, like something he couldn’t live without, like a bomb in his hands that was wired to blow if he tried to put in down.

 _Why him?_ “Because I could pretend to be nice and he could pretend he was brave, and he kissed me like he was trying to tell me something, and I never figured out what it was.”

 _Are you lying?_ “Obviously. I figured it out.”

He knows exactly where he was when he figured it out, too. He was sitting in a rental car at the airport in Providence, waiting to return it before his flight back to Vegas, angry as hell and embarrassed and thinking, _How could he do that to me?_ And it hit him, all at once.

 _Did he love you?_ “No, but he tried. He really did. It would’ve been worth the risk if he could love me back.”

*

They drink a lot, him and Alex. It’s probably unprofessional of both of them, especially Kent.

They talk about things that won’t be on the show when they’re drinking, though, and neither of them is used to being really close to other people. _(Intimacy. You can say it, in-ti-ma-cy. It’s scary as shit, man, but we’re so past normal it’s not even funny.)_

Kent tells Alex about the guys he fucked while Jack was in rehab. Guys who’d been in the league for, like, ten years, who had wives and kids and whole separate lives where they sucked dick and made guys like Kent swear they’d never tell anyone or else they’d get their teeth kicked in.

He tells Alex that he said it too, over the years, but he never meant it. Not like those guys did. Even now, ten years later, whenever Kent gives head, his mouth still waters too much from all the times he imagined them making good on their threats. He can’t separate a blowie from the taste of blood.

He tells Alex about his father punching him in the face last year. About the shock of it, because he never thought his dad gave enough of a shit to actually punch him, and Kent had just given him a car for his fiftieth birthday. (“Don’t ask me if my father loves me. I don’t fucking know.”)

Alex tells Kent that he wanted the part because he fell hard for a boy, once, and didn’t do anything about it. Just watched him on campus, listened to a lot of Frank Ocean, then ran to London for a year to get some theater experience. _I’m fucking tired of being scared of myself. I ran to fucking Europe to get away from my feelings, man, that’s just stupid. I’m bi. It’s not gonna go away if I never kiss a guy._

Alex asks Kent if he wants to fool around, take the pressure off before principal photography kicks off, but Kent just wants to catch that moment on camera - Alex kissing a guy for the first time, with all the fear and need behind it, a question finally settled.

It was always worth the risk, for Kent. It didn’t have to be Jack. It would’ve been someone else, eventually.

And Kent would’ve kept it all to himself and that other person, if he could.

*

They’re shooting Vegas first, in the off-season so they have the run of the rink and the veteran’s house that Kent crashed at for the first three months, but Kent was invited to join the location scouts in Rimouski the week before. He goes back and forth on it, but ends up going, if only so his assistant stops bitching about the pilot not doing anything and making the same paycheck as her.

Kent got the private jet, like, four years ago. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but his mom enjoys it, and for the record, Yasmin definitely makes more than the pilot on Kent’s retainer. 

So he flies out to Rimouski and lowkey loses his shit.

The location scouting goes off without a hitch, because Kent would rather walk into the sea than fail to perform in public. It’s the moments he’s on his own that do him in. They won’t shoot in the actual houses they lived in, Kent in someone else’s bedroom and Jack in a basement with a kitchen and a separate entrance, but the houses they find are actual billet homes in the same neighborhood. They smell the same, almost.

Kent hasn’t been to Rimouski since he cleared his locker. There are a lot of rainbows now, for him, for them, in places he’d rather forget - it’s sort of a pilgrimage, apparently.

They weren’t flying flags when they fucked. It had nothing to do with a community. There was no one else, and it was fine; there was no one but Jack and Kent and lungfuls of each other, spit and sweat and secrets. They had no words for themselves, because it was never just one thing, so it never pushed them into boxes, but now there are all these rainbows that make it something it wasn’t. All these initials they would’ve never carved or painted.

He borrows a car and drives up to Baie-des-Sables. Gets an Airbnb, after he texts Yasmin an SOS. He spends three nights looking out at the water, freezing his ass off. He still has no idea how to feel.

Yasmin and Alex and his location manager keep texting him, so he flies out to LA to put out some fires, and then he goes to Vegas and sleeps in his own bed and tries to forget the thing he’s spending all his time digging up.

*

Alex asks him about his father again, but Kent has nothing left to give. He was loved, or maybe he wasn’t. If he was, it didn’t reach him. He didn’t trust adults then and still doesn’t, but that’s not all on his dad, and he’s not even at the top of the list of adults who let Kent down over the years, himself included.

Alex is twenty-two. Kent doesn’t know how to talk about it in a way that doesn’t imply Alex is too young to get it.

The disappointment doesn’t settle in until you’re in their shoes. There are so many things to say and so much space to give, and it would all make a difference, but you don’t say it because you don’t know if it’ll still be relevant to the kid in a year, and you’ll still be exposed. He almost asks for a flashback scene - himself at fourteen across the kitchen table from his dad, staring each other down across the pride neither of them can swallow, the last gear his dad ever bought for him in the background. But what could it possibly add to the story?

When Kent left, he didn’t think he was coming back. It didn’t hurt any more than living there did.

He will keep this to himself.

*

Call is at six every morning. Kent doesn’t mind; he never lost the habit to wake up before sunrise after all the mornings he and Jack went running when they were kids.

When he and Alex reach the set, Gage is always there already. A girl from Wardrobe tells Kent that Gage arrives a full hour early, which does funny things to Kent’s insides. Alex, of course, watches this like a hawk, and Kent doesn’t know if Alex is studying his microexpressions or the depths of Kent’s fucked-up-ness over Jack, to go funny because some guy does exactly what Jack would do while wearing a flannel.

Kent asks Alex if he wants to kiss Gage. He will, of course; there’s a contract, but Alex wanted something beside that. _(Yeah, he’s hot. Good job, boss!)_

“Do you really?”

Alex shrugs it off like it doesn’t matter, and Kent realizes it probably doesn’t. There has to be someone, a first for everything that comes after.

His main concern is the rewrites for the last two episodes. He keeps adding stuff and pulling it out again, trying to tell the story without hammering home how fucking lonely and miserable he was, and his writers are starting to see the patterns. Everything they’ve come up with for the past week was closer to the unvarnished truth than the notes Kent sends them.

 _I’ll just channel, like, early Sebastian Stan._ “You know what? Screw you too, Alexander.”

Two weeks in, no one figured out yet that Kent only watches on a monitor in a tent. He can’t be there, hearing his own words coming out of someone’s mouth, unless there’s a screen between them. A filter, where he had none.

Gage is taking all his cues from Alex, is the thing.

It looks very, very believable.

*

A month into principal photography, they move to a lot in LA. The hospital set is eerily accurate, down to the fact that the door of Jack’s room doesn’t open. The interior of the room is on the opposite end of the lot, and the B-crew is pretty much left to their own devices.

It’s hard to fuck up shots of Gage pretending he’s unconscious or asking for water, or screaming himself awake.

Kent wasn’t sure the part about the water should be in. He remembers it, but Jack probably doesn’t, and it strikes him as unfair to include it whenever he’s not just plain angry about it - angry that he carries this inside him but Jack doesn’t, that the worst was over for Jack but Kent was still in the middle of it, helpless and scared, already on the outside.

He spent twenty-four hours straight thinking he was still a part of it.

 _(Did you ever think he might do it? Actually try to check out?)_ “No.” _(Liar.)_

He thought Jack wanted to win more than he wanted it to stop. Of course Kent knew how bad it was, because the screaming at night didn’t start in the hospital. The real shock of it was that he misjudged Jack’s priorities, him who knew Jack inside and out.

He genuinely thought Jack would be okay when he left their hotel room that morning. By then, Jack was already unconscious on the bathroom floor, and the story had never been what Kent told himself: that he and Jack were tied together.

That Jack, against every odd, would be the person Kent got to keep.

*

They take apart the hospital waiting room and build the rehab center. Gage is a recovering alcoholic and no stranger to sitting in a circle, so they’re actually a little ahead of schedule. Not by much, but the crew are already getting pretty fucking dire around the craft table - there’s no such thing as good luck on a shoot. A light will probably drop on someone’s head any second now, or one of the principals will get appendicitis.

Alex and Kent drag a couple of apple boxes away from both the cameras and the craft table and sit them up _(New York, but if they’re flat on the ground, that’s LA, and Chicago’s on the narrow edge)_ and sit to watch Gage’s takes. They grab whatever food looks like it’s met a vegetable from craft, and it’s like the world’s smallest 12-step circle, right there in the middle of the lot.

_When did you know he wasn’t coming back?_

“I took the Stanley Cup to his shitty little college campus. He didn’t open the door. You know those videos of me fishing and putting the live fish in the Cup? That was on his campus. I didn’t talk to him for six months.”

Alex doesn’t take his eyes off Gage, which Kent appreciates. It must cost Alex, considering the weird things Kent’s face must be doing.

_When did you start hating him?_

“When I was sixteen.”

_Do you think it’s always like that? A little hate mixed into love?_

Kent watches Gage relive what was probably one of the worst times of his life, talking and talking about himself with people who actually get what he’s talking about. He wonders if Jack will sue him for including this part. It was Alicia who called Kent one night, during the silent year, and ranted. She told him things Jack didn’t want him to know. Kent hasn’t spoken to her since.

“Of course it’s always like that. People hate anything that takes away their choices. Anyone you love takes away your options, and you hate them a little for it.”

_How much do you hate Jack?_

Kent shifts on the (New York) apple box and notices that the grips at craft are sort of staring at him. Maybe he’ll die a slapstick death and the balance will be restored, since the director is about to wrap three hours early.

“How much do you think?”

Alex takes a look around and starts laughing. Kent starts laughing too - it’s hilarious that after all this time, ten years and everything in them, he still hates Jack less than he hates himself.

*

Gage kisses Alex halfway through the shoot.

Alex spends the whole day leading up to it in Kent’s hotel room. They order Bolognese and make a mess of the white sheets, not really talking, but Alex puts on music: _This is my favorite song._

“What is it?” Kent asks, even though he’s pretty sure Jack used to like this album. He didn’t ask, then.

_”Aside” by The Weakerthans. Came out when I was like, four? My parents used to play it in the morning. And then my mom, during the divorce, oh my God, she used to play it all the time. It’s… I don’t know. How I learned about grown-up feelings._

“I wonder why I face affection,” Kent mouths along, “not embrace.” He gives Alex a napkin and falls backward on the bed, away from the plates. “I was always into pop, but then when I got to Canada Jack had all these emo CDs and I couldn’t say no to him, so I ended up listening to a whole bunch of stuff.”

_Hey, Kent? Real talk. What’s your favorite song?_

“If you tell anyone, I will literally end you.” He tilts his head up to narrow his eyes at Alex, then lets it fall back, closes his eyes as tightly as he can. “Dashboard Confessional. _Bend and Not Break.”_

_I don’t know it._

So they listen to it, and Kent thinks about how he used to tell himself he could break and take it with a smile, how his heart always skipped over “pushing everything that’s good away,” like his body already knew it was headed for screaming fights and long nights curled around wet pillows. How Jack always skipped over it when it came up on shuffle on his iPod after he met Kent’s eyes on that throat-straining “won’t you hold me now” once.

It took Kent years to understand that Jack trying to love him meant not dealing with Kent’s side of things if Jack could help it.

“Big scene tomorrow, kid. Feeling okay?”

He can feel Alex dropping to the mattress too. _What was it like? When you kissed him the first time?_

Kent puts his arm over his face; hides his eyes in the crook of his elbow, smells the comforting mix of his soap and sweat and tanned skin.

“You ever play The Floor is Lava? Yeah, like that. Except it wasn’t the floor, it was my whole fucking life, and he was the safe place.”

_Is it still--_

“He wasn’t safe. Lava’s still lava, though.”

In the morning, Kent sits in his tent and watches Alex kissing a boy for the first time. It’s not a closed set; it’s just a kiss, fully clothed, two guys sitting on a bed sharing a pair of earbuds between them.

Alex’s breath stutters and his hands jump off the bedspread, then hover there uncertainly. Lava.

Kent buys him a steak dinner.

*

Sometimes Jack texts to ask how filming’s going. Most times it’s his lawyers talking to Kent’s lawyers and the studio people.

For his and Bittle’s first wedding anniversary, they go to Bob’s cabin on that windy little island. It looks beautiful on Instagram. It’s not beautiful, Kent knows. It’s full of bugs and the water smells weird and there are roots everywhere that you trip over, and you can hear music over the water from three different cabins at night, and the fire downstairs doesn’t actually heat the loft, so you wake up with sore muscles from shivering at night.

If they talked about anything except the show, Kent would’ve told him to take Bittle somewhere nice. Jack looks so happy, though.

It means something.

 _Kiss me,_ Alex says, and Kent does.

He wishes he and Jack still talked, because Jack would find a way to make it not matter. Bygones, for Jack, start five minutes ago. But Jack’s not there to make it bearable, so Kent kisses Alex and pushes the secret into Alex’s mouth instead:

This isn’t love.

_Isn’t it?_

*

There are all the scenes that Kent wavered on.

They shoot the one where Kent goes back to Jersey after the Draft and stares at his childhood photos on the walls of his parents’ house. _(Are you there?)_ (“No.”)

They skip the one where Alicia comes to one of his games and he almost twists his left ankle trying not to skate in front of her.

They do the one where Kent tells his mom he’s in love and she closes her eyes like it’s her fault, somehow. Like this sort of love is something genetic - a mutation that makes you love people in a way that pushes them away, too much but still inadequate, something to be blamed for.

They shoot Alex bargaining with management, and the kegger where Kent tells the truth in the worst possible way.

Alex pushes, and they shoot the scene in the airport parking lot. Kent doesn’t remember what his face was doing, but Alex’s falls apart and turns into something ugly.

Kent fucks him that night. He doesn’t know why. The floor is lava.

_(Is it?)_

*

He leaves the filler hockey scenes to a choreographer and the B-team and heads back to Vegas to prep for the season. Other than the second honeymoon, Jack spent the off-season training, and Kent’s not about to make anything easy for him.

It takes a couple of days to fall back into his routine. He didn’t go to any camps this summer, so he’s kinda out of step, but his personal trainer drops his other clients to push Kent to his limits again. It’s good; cleansing, sort of, after months of making decisions and having people turn to him like he’s any sort of hero in his story.

He gets the guys who still speak to him like an actual person to his house for a barbeque.

Three weeks later, Alex is on his doorstep, trailing two suitcases. They match, Kent notices - Rimowa, so at least the kid’s put his first real paycheck to good use.

They look at each other across the threshold.

Then Kent steps back, and starts thinking about dinner. 

ii.

Alex doesn’t take up much space. He gets his own trainer, because he’s due to start filming again in a month and has to put on about twenty pounds of muscle, and his own nutritionist, who fills the bottom shelves of Kent’s fridge with ready-made meals.

Kent doesn’t ask why he’s there. Maybe, Alex thinks, he just assumes people wash up in Vegas to prepare for the next phases in their careers, and that involves eating disgusting amounts of protein and lying in bed at night paralyzed by muscle aches.

Alex doesn’t want to get his nose into the editing process, but Kent scoots over on the couch when his editors send stuff over, so Alex sits down and nods or shakes his head.

He knows Kent’s body so well that they tense and release at the same time, always. He knows Kent so well that he knows why Kent frowns, or breathes out with his diaphragm, or rolls his eyes. He’s not necessary, but he doesn’t want Kent to do this alone when they could do it together.

 _(Why did you flinch here?)_ (”You still hear what he just said.”)

They don’t fuck, which Alex could’ve guessed. Did guess, in fact; he went back to Vancouver and auditioned, bought better luggage and went to LA and auditioned, read the fine print in the contract he signed while shooting Snipe, and dreamed about Kent Parson every night, and out of every open door, Alex knew which one he’d rather walk through.

They grunt at each other and drink their gross protein shakes at six every morning. Even the glasses make sense.

*

“I’m not you,” Alex says on the first Saturday, lying on the edge of Kent’s pool.

He blinks open his eyes and takes in the fucking glorious image of Kent Parson in the tiny, like, _bikini bottom_ he’d never be caught dead in on camera or in front of his teammates. If the past few months hadn’t cleared things up for Alex, this alone would’ve done it.

He rallies and says, “I just know you. You know me too, man. This isn’t that kinda movie.”

Kent, all six glorious feet of him, dives into the pool. He shakes his head obnoxiously close to Alex’s edge when he resurfaces.

_I’m not gonna fuck you._

“Did I ask you to? Sit the fuck down, you need sunscreen.”

Kent pulls himself out of the pool and pads over to the chaise-longue next to Alex. Alex looks at the wet footprints instead of Kent’s face, gives him a minute to settle his expression, and here’s the kicker: Alex wouldn’t need that break, just like he’d never pull off that smooth lift.

Other than blond ambition, they’re not actually similar.

Alex is as gentle as he can be, rubbing the lotion into Kent’s skin. He doesn’t have to ask. He knows no one’s been gentle before.

*

Kent’s first preseason game is on the day that Alex has to fly back to LA. They drive to the airport in Kent’s Aces-black Lambo early in the morning.

Alex feels heavier in the seat than he did in the taxi when he arrived, wider, solid. He looks at Kent and sees the same thing - he takes up more space than Alex has ever seen him, even when Kent was running a set on three hours of sleep.

“Truth?” Alex asks him.

Kent parks and glows, for a moment, before he resolves again into the sum of his parts. He nods, looking straight ahead at the other cars dropping off passengers, the people staring at his car.

Alex turns his head to watch a family of sunburnt tourists hauling their suitcases and angry kids into the building. Someone’s dog is walking obediently into a crate. A reality TV star is taking a selfie stepping into a Range Rover, hovering half-in until the angle’s right. His hand reaches blindly for Kent’s arm.

“I love you, man. But no one’s gonna write a fucking show about us.”

It takes a long time for Kent’s hand to cover Alex’s. The cars behind them are honking.

Alex bursts out laughing a second before Kent does.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr @soundslikepenance


End file.
